Omega

prologue

On the surface at Brinkmann IV (“Moonlight”), in IC4756, 1300 light-years from Earth.

Autumn 2230.

IT WAS THE most majestic series of structures David Collingdale had ever seen. Steeples and domes and polygons rose out of ice and snow. Walkways soared among the towers, or their remnants. Many had collapsed. There were pyramids and open squares that might once have been parks or courtyards. An obelisk anchored the center of the city. It was a place out of time, frozen, preserved for the ages, a landscape that might have been composed by Montelet. A place of crystal and glass, and, in a kinder age, of flowering trees and shaped hedges and beckoning forest. Catch it at the right time, when its giant moon, half again as big as Luna, was in the sky, and one might have thought that here was the celestial city, Valhalla, Argolis, El Dorado by night.

It looked too ethereal to have actually served as a home for a thriving population. Rather, Collingdale could not get away from the sense that it had been intended by its builders as a work of art, to remain unused, to stand as a monument rather than a city. Several of the towers had collapsed, broken fragments rising out of a thick carpet of snow. Its name was unknown, so they called it Moonlight, the city and the world and the sense of something lost.

A bleak wind howled down the empty streets, chilling him even in the e-suit, which was apparently not functioning properly. He’d see to getting it adjusted when he got back to the dome. Wouldn’t want to have it fail out here at twenty below.

The sun was struggling to get above a flat mountain range. Several thousand years ago, something had gone wrong with it. Abrams had explained it to him, a surfeit of metals or some such thing. Just temporary, he’d insisted. Be back to normal, he expected, in another few thousand years. Not that it would matter.

He was at the equator, where the remnants of the once-global civilization had fled. There were other cities, most in areas that had once been equatorial, some buried in snowfields, still others frozen behind walls of ice.

He and his team knew little yet about the race that had lived here, except that they were a long time dead, and their architecture rivaled anything man had produced. Crystal bridges thrown across mighty rivers, hyperbolic domes, broad walkways in the sky. All frozen now, the bridges as well as the rivers, the crystal as well as the spirit.

It was perhaps a hard irony that Moonlight, which had thrived and died about the time humans were rolling stones out of quarries to build the first pyramids, would probably have remained undiscovered indefinitely had it not been that it was about to receive an unwelcome visitor. A survey ship, the Harry Coker, had been watching an omega, one of the monstrous clouds that drifted in waves out of the galactic core, and which seemed bent on destroying any civilization in their path. The Coker was anxious to see how the cloud would fare in the complex gravity field of a planetary system, when it spotted evidence of cities on the fourth planet.

Collingdale squinted into the hard gray sky. The cloud was visible from late afternoon until shortly after midnight. It was up there now, partially obscured in the glare of the sunset. In the daytime it looked utterly harmless, a large dark thunderstorm, perhaps, like a million others he had seen in his lifetime. But this one rose and set with the sky beyond the atmosphere. It always described the same path across the heavens and it kept getting bigger.

The omega clouds were old news. They’d been discovered a quarter century earlier. Although no one had ever seen them attack a city, they were tied to massive destruction in ancient times on Quraqua, Beta Pacifica III, and two other worlds. Objects with a wide range of geometric shapes had been floated in front of the omegas, and humans now knew beyond any question that designs not found in nature could expect to draw lightning bolts.

Nobody understood how or why. No one knew where they came from. And few seemed to feel it was likely we would ever find out.

Until now, no one had seen a cloud change course and glide into a planetary system. No one had seen a city under attack.

It was fortunate nobody lived on Moonlight. The inhabitants had obviously been overwhelmed by the ice age brought on by the instability of their sun. Best estimates were that there’d been no one there for about two thousand years.

COLLINGDALE HAD GROWN up in Boston with an alcoholic mother and a missing father, who, his mother insisted until the day of her sodden teary death, had gone west on business and would be back any day. He’d spent two years in an orphanage, been adopted by a pair of religious fanatics, run away so many times they’d eventually implanted a tracker, and—despite everything—won a scholarship from the University of Massachusetts. He’d taken a degree in archeology, taken private flying lessons on a whim, and, as he liked to think of it, never again touched ground. Eventually he’d decided that flights between Chicago and Boston were too confining. He’d learned to pilot the superluminals, had taken the command seat for several major corporations and the Academy, had gotten bored hauling people and supplies back and forth through the void, gone back to school, and specialized in a discipline that, at that time, lacked subject matter: xenology.

In the meantime he’d attended the funerals of both his foster parents, who’d died a year apart, the one unable to live without the other. They’d refused longevity treatments on the grounds they were not God’s plan. They’d never given up on him, even though they disapproved of the directions his life had taken. He’d stopped going home during the last years of their lives because they kept telling him they forgave him and were sure God would as well.

He didn’t know why they intruded on his thoughts while he gazed across the city. He would have liked them to see Moonlight. Surely they would have been caught up in its majesty, and they might have understood what his life was about.

THE OMEGAS ROUTINELY hurled lightning bolts at perpendiculars. Any object designed with right angles, or sharp departures from nature’s natural arcs, could expect to become a target.

It had seemed an old wives’ tale when the stories first came back. Collingdale recalled that the scientific community, almost to a person, had scoffed at the reports. The notion that clouds could somehow navigate on their own seemed absurd. That they could bump up to high velocities more absurd still. Most had not accepted the idea until the one approaching Moonlight, the Brinkmann Cloud, had changed course, begun to slow down, and headed insystem. That was four years ago.

The claims had been so outlandish that nobody who cared about his reputation had even tested them. But once the Brinkmann showed its ability to navigate, researchers had come, and an attempt to explain the impossible had begun. It had begun with the discovery of nanos in samples taken from the omega.

Were the clouds natural objects? Or artificial? Did the universe disapprove of intelligent life? Or was there a psychotic force in existence somewhere? Or, as his parents had thought, was God sending a warning?

“You coming, Dave?”

They’d cut their way into the base of the northeastern tower, and Jerry Riley was standing aside, leaving for Dave the honor of being first person to enter the structure. He clapped a few shoulders, strode down between banks of dugout snow, paused at the entrance, put his head in, and flashed his lamp around.

The interior was as large as New York’s main terminal. The ceiling soared several stories. Benches were scattered throughout the area. Sleek metal columns supported balconies and galleries. Alcoves that might once have been shops were set into the walls. And there was a statue.

He took a few steps inside, scarcely daring to breathe. They knew what the natives looked like because they’d found remains. But they’d never seen any depictions of them. No sculptures, no graphics, no engravings. How odd it had seemed that a species so given to art had given them no copies of its own image.

The others filed in and spread out around him, all enamored of the statue. Jerry raised his lamp slowly, almost reverently, and played the light across it. It was a feline. Claws were replaced by manipulative digits, but the snout and fangs remained. Narrow eyes, in front. A predator. But it wore a hat, rather like an artist’s beret, angled down over one eye. It was decked out in trousers, a shirt with long fluffy sleeves, and a jacket that would not have looked out of place in Boston. A bandanna was tied around its neck. And it sported a cane.

One of the women giggled.

Collingdale couldn’t suppress a smile himself, and yet despite its comic aspect, the creature displayed a substantial degree of dignity.

There was an inscription on the base, a single line of characters, executed in a style reminiscent of Old English. It was probably a single word. “Its name?” someone suggested.

Collingdale wondered what the subject had done. A Washington? A Churchill? A Francis Bacon? Perhaps a Mozart.

“The architect,” said Riley, short and generally cynical. “This is the guy who built the place.” Riley didn’t like being out here, but needed this last mission to establish his bona fides with the University of Something-or-Other back home. He’d be an inspiration to the students.

It was odd how the intangibles carried over from species to species. Dignity. Majesty. Power. Whether it was seen in an avian or a monkey, or something between, it always had the same look.

His commlink vibrated against his wrist. It was Alexandra, who’d arrived two days before on the al-Jahani with a cargo of nukes, which she’d been instructed to use in an effort to blow away the cloud. Nobody believed it could be done, but no other course of action offered itself. The cloud was simply too big, thirty-four thousand kilometers in diameter. A few nukes would have no effect.

“Yes, Alex. What’ve you got?”

“It’s still slowing down, Dave. And it’s still on target.”

“Okay.”

“It’s coming in on your side of the world. Looks as if it’s homed in on your city. We’re going to set the bombs off tonight. In about six hours.”

The omega was slowing down by firing jets of dust and hydrogen forward. Riley thought it might also be twisting gravity, but there was no evidence yet to support that idea. The only thing that mattered was that, however it was managing things, the cloud was going to arrive right on top of Moonlight.

THEY WANDERED FOR hours through the underground. There was a network of smaller chambers connected to the large area. They found an endless number of chairs, bowls, radios, monitors, plumbing fixtures, conference tables. Artifacts they couldn’t identify. Much of it was in surprisingly good condition. There were boxes of plastic disks, undoubtedly memory storage units. But electronic records were fragile. Early civilizations carved their history onto clay tablets, which lasted virtually forever. More advanced groups went for paper, which had a reasonable shelf life, provided it was stored in a dry place and not mishandled. But electronic data had no staying power. They had not yet been able to recover a single electronic record.

There were some books, which had not been stored properly. Nevertheless, they gathered them into plastic containers. They’d been in the area several weeks, but there was a special urgency about this visit. The cloud was coming. Anything they did not carry off today might not survive.

The walls were covered with engravings. Collingdale assigned one of his people to record as many of them as she could. Some of it was symbolic, much was graphic, usually with bucolic themes, leaves and stems and branches, all of which, when the sun came back, might grow on this world again.

Stairways and shafts rose high into the structure and descended to lower floors, which were encased in ice. “But that might be a huge piece of good luck,” Collingdale told Ava MacAvoy, who looked unusually attractive in the reflected light. “It should survive the cloud, whatever happens to the rest of the city.”

They went back outside. It was time to leave, but Collingdale delayed, taking more pictures, recording everything. Ava and Riley and the others had to pull him away.

The cloud was setting by then, and Collingdale wished it was possible to halt the planet on its axis, keep the other side between the omega and the towers. Hide the city.

Damn you.

He stood facing it, as if he would have held it off by sheer will.

Ava took his arm. “Come on, Dave,” she said. “It’s getting late.”

THEY RETREATED TO the dome, which had served as their base for the better part of a month. A lander waited beside it. The dome was small, cramped, uncomfortable. They’d brought out too many people, and could in fact have brought several shiploads more. Everyone had wanted to come to Moonlight. The Academy, under time pressure, had tried to accommodate the requests as best it could. It should have said no. That was partly Collingdale’s own fault for not demanding they cut things off.

They’d filled the dome with artifacts and shipped them topside to the al-Jahani, which now carried a treasure trove of mugs and plates and table lamps and electronic gear, and materials far more esoteric, objects whose function defied analysis. Other pieces were now being loaded. There was more than the lander could handle, but they’d stacked the rest in the dome, hoping that it would be safe there.

Collingdale waited until everybody else was on board—there were seven of them, excluding the pilot—took a last look around, and climbed in. The omega was almost down. Only a black ridge of clouds was visible in the west, and a few streaked plumes soared above the horizon. The pilot started the engines, and the lander rose. Nobody said much.

Jerry commented how scary it was, and Collingdale couldn’t restrain a smile. He himself was of the old school. He’d started his archeological career in Iraq, had been shot at, threatened, deported. When archeology went interstellar, as it had a half century ago, it had become, curiously enough, safer. There were no deranged local populations defending sacred tombs, no warlords for whom the security payment might be insufficient, no national governments waiting to collapse with dire consequences to the researchers, who might be jailed, beaten, even killed. There were still hazards, but they tended to be less unpredictable, and more within the control of the individual. Don’t take foolish chances, and you won’t get burned. Don’t stay too long in the submerged temple, as had famously happened to Richard Wald twenty-some years earlier, when you know the tidal wave’s coming.

So Collingdale was getting his people out in plenty of time. But it didn’t prevent them from thinking they were having a narrow escape from something dire. In fact, of course, at no time were they in danger.

He was looking down at the receding city when the pilot informed him he had an incoming transmission from the al-Jahani. He opened the channel, turning up the volume so everybody could hear. Alexandra’s blond features appeared on-screen. “We’ve launched, Dave,” she said. “All twelve running true. Detonation in thirty-eight minutes.”

The missiles were cluster weapons, each carrying sixteen nukes. If the plan worked, the missiles would penetrate two thousand kilometers into the cloud and jettison their weapons, which would explode simultaneously. Or they would explode when their electronics failed. The latter provision arose from the inability of researchers to sink probes more than a few kilometers into the clouds. Once inside, everything tended to shut down. Early on, a few ships had been lost.

“Good luck, Alex,” he said. “Give it hell.”

The lander, powered by its spike technology, ascended quickly, traveling west. The cloud began to rise also. The flight had been planned to allow the occupants a view of the omega when the missiles reached the target.

Collingdale ached for a success. There was nothing in his life, no award, no intellectual breakthrough, no woman, he had ever wanted as passionately as he wanted to see Alexandra’s missiles blow the son of a bitch to hell.

They climbed into orbit and passed into sunlight. Everyone sat quietly, not talking much. Riley and Ava pretended to be examining an electronic device they’d brought up, trying to figure out what it was. Jerry was looking through his notes. Even Collingdale, who prided himself on total honesty, gazed steadfastly at a recently recorded London conference on new Egyptian finds.

The cloud filled the sky again.

“Three minutes,” said Alex.

THEY COULDN’T SEE the al-Jahani directly. It was too far, and it was lost somewhere in the enormous plumes that fountained off the cloud’s surface like so many tendrils reaching toward Moonlight. But its position was known, and Bill, the ship’s artificial intelligence, had put a marker on the screen. They could see the cloud, of course, and the positions of the missiles were also marked. Twelve blinking lights closing on the oversize gasbag. Collingdale amused himself by counting the weapons.

“Thirty seconds to impact,” said the pilot.

Collingdale let his head fall back. He wondered whether one could achieve impact with a cloud.

Ava watched the time, and her lips were moving, counting down the seconds.

“They’re in,” she said. Someone’s hand touched his shoulder. Gripped it. Good luck.

Riley adjusted his harness.

Collingdale, knowing his foster parents would have been proud, muttered a prayer.

“They’ve gone off.” Alexandra’s voice. “Too soon.”

There were a few glimmerings along the surface of the cloud. But he saw no sign of disruption.

“It might take a while before we can really see anything,” said Riley, hopefully.

The hand on his shoulder let go.

“You’re right,” said one of the others. “I mean, the cloud is so big.”

“The bombs had to do some damage. How could they not?”

“Maybe just screw up the steering mechanism. Hell, that would be enough.”

The glimmering got brighter. Collingdale thought he saw an explosion. Yes, there was no doubt of it. And there. Over there was a second eruption of some kind. They watched several patches grow more incandescent. Watched the cloud pass overhead. Watched it begin to sink toward the rim of the world.

The explosive patches darkened.

On a second orbit, they were still visible, smoldering scars on the otherwise pacific surface of the omega.

“I don’t think it’s going to work,” said the pilot.

ON THE THIRD orbit, they rendezvoused with the Quagmor, the vessel that had transported them to the system. The mood on the ship was dark, and everybody was making comments about having made a good effort. Just so much we can do.

Alexandra reported that the omega was still on course for Moonlight. “We didn’t get much penetration. There’s still a chance we might have done some damage that just doesn’t show. I mean, if we blew up the internal skunk works, how would we know? So don’t give up, Doc.”

He didn’t. But the view was unsettling. The jets reached out, arcing as if to encircle the planet. The omega was a malignant force, a thing out of religious myth, an agency beyond understanding.

The al-Jahani maneuvered around the fringes of the cloud, trying to record as much of the event as it could. Collingdale went to his quarters, slept, got up, slept some more. The cloud closed and, as the city rotated into position, made contact directly above. Winds howled. Lightning ripped through the skies. Tornadoes formed.

It was just after sunset.

Collingdale could hardly bring himself to watch. Electrical discharges had been growing in the cloud, had become more intense as it drew nearer. The storm gathered force, but the towers stood, and the planet rotated, moving the city directly to ground zero and then past. And for a while he hoped it would get clear. But without warning a gigantic bolt tore though the cloud and hammered the city. The chess-piece structures seemed to melt and blacken and sink into the ice. Sprays of pebbles rattled against them, and something blasted into the base of one of the corner towers. The tower shuddered and began to lean precipitously. Other buildings collapsed or were blown away. Once, twice, they lost the picture as satellites were neutralized. Lightning ripped out of the night, scorched the diamond steeples and the crystal polygons. Hurricane-force winds hurled black dust across the snowscape. A few rocks fell from the sky, plowing into glass and crystal. It needed only a few minutes, and when it was over, a ground blizzard buried everything.

Collingdale was hardly a violent or even a confrontational man. He hadn’t been in a loud argument as far back as he could remember. But in those moments he would have killed. Rage spilled out of his soul, sheer fury driven to excess by his helplessness.

The cloud wrapped itself around the world, around Moonlight, and it found the other cities. It struck them in a display of sheet lightning, forked lightning, chain lightning, and fireballs. Collingdale couldn’t get away from it. He wandered through the ship, downing glasses of rum, extreme behavior for a man who seldom drank. He couldn’t stop moving, from the bridge to the mission center to the common room to his cabin to Riley’s quarters. (“Hey, Dave, look at what this damned thing is doing in the north.”) It fed his rage to watch, and for reasons he would never understand, it gave him a twisted pleasure to hate so fiercely.

When finally the cloud grew dormant, pieces of it broke off and began to drift away, as if there were no gravity near the planet to hold on to them. The skies began to clear.

The cities were charred and wrecked, wreathed in black smoke. Ava was in tears. Most of the others were in a state of shock. The devastation was more complete than anything they had imagined.

Collingdale was drinking black coffee, trying to clear his head, when a couple of the technicians created a commotion. “Look,” one of them said, pointing at a screen.

At a city. Intact.

Untouched.

Its towers still stood tall. Its hanging walkways still connected rooftops. A monument was down, and, on its southern flank, a minaret had collapsed. Otherwise, it had escaped.

It was halfway around the globe from where the intersection with the cloud had happened. The safest possible place. But that alone wouldn’t have been enough. Other cities, equally distant, had been leveled.

They went back and looked at the record.

Collingdale saw it right away: snow. The surviving city had been experiencing a blizzard when the cloud hit.

“It never saw this place,” said Ava.

FIELD REPORT: Moonlight

The only aspects of this civilization that survive are the city that suffered a timely blizzard, and the bases the inhabitants had established on the moon and on the third planet. And in the artifacts that we’ve managed to haul away.

The loss is incalculable. And I hope that someone, somewhere, will realize that it is time to devise a defense against the omegas. Not to wait until our turn comes, when it might be too late. But to do it now, before the next Moonlight happens.

— David Collingdale

Preliminary Post-omega Report

December 11, 2230